Ever since I was old enough to understand what ghosts were, I have had an enduring fascination with the paranormal and horror in general. I’ve mainly read horror novels and Casper was my all-time favorite movie growing up. In fact, I watched it so often that I managed to wear out the VHS we had. When I found out my wife had never seen the movie, I promptly ordered it on DVD to show her and it’s still sitting on my shelf ready for my son to watch when he is old enough.
So what is it that captivates me about horror? This is a question I’ve been pondering for many years and have yet to come to a definitive conclusion for. Some people find the genre appalling or too scary to digest, but I’ve always been riveted by it and have never had much of an issue with the “scary” aspect.
However, my specific interest in the paranormal and vampires leads me to believe that I am particularly interested in the topic of (im)mortality. Monsters, zombies, murderers, torturers, and other subgenres of horror just don’t do it for me like ghosts and the undead.
Ghosts, History and Architecture
This might seem like a bit of a stretch, but my interest in history has certainly played a role in my interest. In most stories, both ghosts and vampires are old beings from a time long past. They have witnessed a significant amount of history and while that usually isn’t relevant to the actual story, that doesn’t stop me from imagining what they might have witnessed in their long existences. It almost makes me a little jealous sometimes.
Architecture is another major passion of mine that is a factor in my interest in horror. Large, rambling, decaying, haunted manors and castles sometimes even steal the show for me away from the actual ghosts and vampires. As a kid, I would draw the façade and create possible floor plans of Whipstaff Manor from the movie Casper. If I wasn’t drawing a car, I was drawing a haunted house. I still have some of my drawings from elementary school, floor plans included.
While I have always had an interest in history, the haunted houses I kept encountering in ghost stories fueled my interest in the nineteenth century in particular. I attribute this to the fact that most of the stories had ghosts and houses from that time period. It wasn’t until I was much older that I realized how incredibly popular ghost stories were in the nineteenth century.
It was a period of fascination for the paranormal, gothic and supernatural. No wonder I fell in love with it and even created a blog about nineteenth-century history. Ghost stories that include haunted houses are still my absolute favorites, especially if they are from the nineteenth century.
Vampires and Programming
So far, I’ve mostly talked about ghosts, but vampires have also played a role. Traditionally, people have always been afraid to become a vampire, but in my teenage years, I became fascinated with the idea. Of course, it also wasn’t the traditional, monstrous vampire I had in mind, but rather the intelligent, sophisticated kind you read about in modern books such as Interview with the Vampire by Anne Rice or Empire of the Vampire by Jay Kristoff.
Befitting my passion for programming, I took it upon myself to program a mostly text-based vampire RPG for Mac OS X back in 2004/2005. I figured I could write a story for the players to follow, but wasn’t particularly artistic in a visual sense, so text-based would be the best method.
Unfortunately, I didn’t make it very far, but it was a great lesson in programming and the source code still exists online for those who are interested.
(Im)mortality
Despite all the tangents my hobbies and activities have taken, I believe there is a single thread that runs through my fascination with ghosts and vampires: (im)mortality. I write it like that because both mortality and immortality are intrinsically linked. The fact of mortality drives the age-old obsession for immortality.
I am someone with a lot of interests who never seems to have enough time to pursue and experience everything that I would like to in my life. While I’m certainly not the only one with this problem, it has led me to develop an interest in immortality as I imagine myself being able to do everything I would like to with my life.
The other aspect of immortality for me is something I’ve already hinted about above. It’s the idea that a being is able to witness and be a part of so much history. This, of course, is driven by my interest in history and is something I would love to experience myself. Naturally, history has its unpleasant periods such as wars and plagues, but if you’re an immortal being, you wouldn’t, in theory, have to worry about them like you do as a mortal being. You could just sit back and watch the show.
Conclusion
When I read a horror story, I seem to be able to relate to the ghosts and vampires more than the other characters, even if they are supposed to be the antagonists. I feel a certain connection to them which is what keeps drawing me back to their stories.
Needless to say, the horror genre has had an enormous impact on my life and my interests. Whether it’s writing my own horror fiction, writing about the genre itself, reading a scary story, watching a spooky movie, programming a game, drawing up floor plans for a haunted house, or composing dark music, I’ve spent countless hours engaged with some related activity and I couldn’t be happier with it.
